John Kersey the younger (fl. 1720) was an English philologist and lexicographer of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. He is notable for editing three dictionaries in his lifetime: A New English Dictionary (1702), a revised version of Edward Phillips' The New World of English Words (1706) and the Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum (1708).

As well as being amongst the earliest monolingual English dictionaries, they were also amongst the first to focus on words in common use, rather than on difficult words.

He was son of John Kersey the elder, with whom he has often been confused, and revised the work of his father in the fourteenth edition of the Arithmetic of Edmund Wingate (1720). He, more probably than his father, contributed the Discourse to an unlearned Prince' to the Translation of Plutarch's Morals, which appeared 1684-5 (republished 1870).

He was mainly occupied with lexicography. The sixth edition of Phillips's 'New World of Words, which was published in 1706, was edited by him (Pref to Dict. Anglo-Britannicum, 1 708). He greatly added to the number of words, and published a seventh edition in 1720. Another dictionary, the New English Dictionary, of which the first edition is said to have appeared in 1702 (2nd 1713, 3rd 1731, &c.), was also assigned on the title-page to J. K., but Kersey's responsibility for the work has been questioned. In 1708 was printed his Dictionarium Anglo-Britannicum, comprehending a brief explication of all sorts of difficult words; a new edition in 1715 contained 'words and phrases made use of in our ancient statutes, old records, charters;' the third edition appeared in 1721. The date of his death is uncertain. From Kersey's Dictionarium Thomas Chatterton borrowed part of his archaic vocabulary.

Bernard (George) Stevens (2 March 1916 – 6 January 1983) was a British composer.

Born in London, Stevens studied English and Music at the University of Cambridge with E. J. Dent, then at the Royal College of Music with R.O. Morris and Gordon Jacob from 1937 to 1940. His op.l, a violin sonata, attracted the attention of Max Rostal, who commissioned a Violin Concerto, which Stevens wrote while on army service. In 1946 his First Symphony, entitled Symphony of Liberation, won first prize in a competition sponsored by the Daily Express newspaper for a 'Victory Symphony' to celebrate the end of the war with a premiere at the Royal Albert Hall.

In 1948 Stevens was appointed Professor of Composition at the Royal College of Music, a post he combined from 1967 with a professorship at the University of London. As an examiner he travelled widely, especially in Eastern Europe.

Although he resigned his membership of the Communist Party in protest at the Soviet suppression of the 1956 Hungarian uprising, Stevens was intellectually and emotionally committed to the left and associated with other socialist artists and writers, such as his friends Alan Bush, Randall Swingler and Montagu Slater, and was active in the Workers' Musical Association.

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Sir Arthur Edward Drummond Bliss, CH, KCVO (2 August 1891 – 27 March 1975) was an English composer and conductor.

Bliss's musical training was cut short by the First World War, in which he served with distinction in the army. In the post-war years he quickly became known as an unconventional and modernist composer, but within the decade he began to display a more traditional and romantic side in his music. In the 1920s and 1930s he composed extensively not only for the concert hall, but also for films and ballet.

In the Second World War, Bliss returned to England from the US to work for the BBC and became its director of music. After the war he resumed his work as a composer, and was appointed Master of the Queen's Music.

In Bliss's later years, his work was respected but was thought old-fashioned, and it was eclipsed by the music of younger colleagues such as William Walton and Benjamin Britten. Since his death, his compositions have been well represented on record, and many of his better-known works remain in the repertoire of British orchestras.

Stanley Bate (December 12, 1911 – October 19, 1959) was an English composer and pianist.

Bate received early training in music and had composed two operas by age twenty. He studied under Ralph Vaughan Williams, R.O. Morris, Gordon Jacob, and Arthur Benjamin, and then in Paris with Nadia Boulanger and in Berlin with Paul Hindemith. He wrote incidental music for performances at German playhouses, and toured Australia and the United States as a pianist. Bate was openly gay but was married to fellow composer Peggy Glanville-Hicks from 1938 to 1949, when they divorced. After several years living in America, where Bate and Glanville-Hicks had moved in 1941, he returned to London; he received less praise in his birth country than abroad, and the lack of attention his works received resulted in his decision to commit suicide in 1959. There has been recent interest in his music with the high profile and well reviewed recordings of his Symphonies 3 & 4 with Martin Yates conducting The Royal Scottish National Orchestra on the Dutton Epoch label.

John Winston Ono Lennon, MBE (9 October 1940 – 8 December 1980) was an English musician and singer-songwriter who rose to worldwide fame as one of the founder members of The Beatles, one of the most commercially successful and critically acclaimed acts in the history of popular music. Together with Paul McCartney, he formed one of the most celebrated songwriting partnerships of the 20th century.

Born and raised in Liverpool, Lennon became involved as a teenager in the skiffle craze; his first band, The Quarrymen, evolved into The Beatles in 1960. As the group disintegrated towards the end of the decade, Lennon embarked on a solo career that produced the critically acclaimed albums John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band and Imagine, and iconic songs such as "Give Peace a Chance" and "Imagine". After his marriage to Yoko Ono in 1969, he changed his name to John Ono Lennon. Lennon disengaged himself from the music business in 1975 to devote time to raising his infant son Sean, but re-emerged with Ono in 1980 with the new album Double Fantasy. He was murdered three weeks after its release.